It hasn’t even been a week and already I’m overwhelmed.
As a senior, I should be used to Princeton by now.
But every year starts the same — with promises to myself and desires to do more of my assigned readings, sleep more, spend more time with my friends, exercise more or try this new activity. It never works out as planned. And this year is already proving to be no exception. Add a thesis and the uncertainty about what I’ll be doing next year and, well, you could say that I’m anxious.
But let me not bore you with the details of my poor time management or feelings of anxiety and stress. I’m sure many of you have had similar feelings and experiences and don’t want to hear about mine. Rather, let me impart some thoughts I’ve been having the last few days as I’ve been sinking into the background level of stress I have come to associate with being at Princeton.
Every year, I plan to start over. This time I will get it right. This time I will be more rested, get more done, have more fun. Never mind that it just isn’t possible to fit everything I want to do into the day — or even the week. Feasibility isn’t part of my thought process leading up to the new school year. Instead I am hopeful in my denial.
But maybe the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough time or that I have too much I need or want to do. Maybe the problem is my approach.
Realistically, I’m probably going to be stressed to some degree for the rest of my life. I think the same can be said for many other Princeton students. We are at a top-rate university that is training us to be leaders. Whether we go into politics, finance, science or any other field, our Princeton education will put us in a position with some degree of influence and decision-making ability. In my case, I will likely go to graduate school and become a marine biologist. As exciting as that sounds (or at least I think it does), there will be some stress. Experiments fail. Grants aren’t awarded. Deadlines pass. Shit happens.
Beyond work, there will be the stress of paying for bills, raising children, arguing with spouses, et cetera. My diverse interests and hobbies won’t disappear just because I’m an adult.
The point is, stress and being busy don’t end here. Much as I like to envision a stress-free future after Princeton, it just doesn’t exist. That’s not reality.
I can check things off my to-do list but that magical moment when I’ve crossed everything off and can go have fun will never appear. If I base my stress and happiness on the amount of things I have left to do, I’m never going to achieve satisfaction and I’m never going to have time for the things I find most meaningful.
The trick, then, is to juggle obligations and desires while minimizing stress. The key to this — and I’m sure many of you have already realized this — is to go with the flow, day by day, week by week. If I want to go to that yoga class today, why not? If I want to take a Yiddish class in New York because Princeton doesn’t offer one, I might as well. If I want to stay longer at dinner and keep talking with a friend, by all means.
Tomorrow or next week might look different. And that’s OK. Rather than making a plan for the next year of every activity I want to do, I can allow some flexibility into my schedule, some space to choose what I want to do on a given day. I may not be able to do everything I want to do every day, but if I do some things some days and other things other days, by the end of the year I’ll be looking back at a year full of the things I wanted to do.
Certainly there will be days full of obligation and stress, when there really is no time for anything else — say, during midterms. But the less we schedule, the less pressure we will feel and the more time we will have to do something, if not everything, we want.
Obviously this mindset is still something I’m learning. I haven’t really had a chance to test it out and I could be wrong. Maybe it’s just another form of denial, of fooling myself that I can do it all.
But I hope not. I’m starting to think that one of the best life lessons Princeton can give us is not the knowledge we learn in the classroom or our readings (though I do value that), but the ability to juggle a packed schedule and deal with stress.
Miriam Geronimus is an ecology and evolutionary biology major from Ann Arbor, Mich. She can be reached at mgeronim@princeton.edu.
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